Badke’s tone adds a little excitement to research. I’ve learned about online books and to search within a book. Google, Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Live Search Book Publisher Program+offers search capabilities. Some offer free access to certain books, however, I’ve come into problems where a fee is involved and then I’ll research another service to find what I need. Badke also writes about journal databases and how to maneuver around all of those. EBSCO is my favorite. My problem is narrowing down the subject and then finding a keyword to get me started. And Badke helped here by writing about the portals. Actually, I prefer that. Subjects are organized by the cite. Examples are:History on the Web and Biology Online and academicinfo.net is an educational subject directory. The one we used in class – www.ipl.org and refdesk are both reference sources I found usefull in my searches for the preservation of newspapers. All this is new to me and at least now I can use Badke for my Bible when I attempt to finish my B.S. degree.

I have interesting materials for my paper on newspaper preservation. I received a book yesterday, which is an inter-library loan form Queens College, called, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” It’s an edited book, on a collection of essays, on the research value of printed materials in the digital age. Also, I have two articles from my search on “Google Scholar”and more articles from a reference book, found in our library and two articles from newspaprers to help me write about newspaper preservation. My research will try to answer the question, “What is the best strategy to use when preserving newspapers in digital format to ensure access for the general public?”

There are many issues concerning preservation besides money and storage concerns. Copywrite concerns on a digital format also is something that concerns conservators. Although, I can not cover myriad details on preservation, to allow for an open public system, many pertinent issues have to be co-ordinated between funding sources, librarians, scholars and the needs of the public.

I used Google Advance Search to start off looking for articles on newspaper preservation. Two articles from two different journals were exactly about my topic on newspaper preservation. Actually, the one article, ” Automatic page analysis for the creation of a digital library from newspaper archives” was written over my head. However, it discussed digital preservation concerning salvation of endangered material (paper) as well as a creation of digital library services that will allow full utilization of the archives by anyone interested. It went into detail about capturing the image and conversion to gray scale and every pixel has an approximation to text, title, pictures, lines and symbols. It discussed the technical difficulties of the layout of the newspaper format. It went into all kinds of detatiled information on building a suitable digital representation for the contents of the article. I certainly got what I asked for! But I don’t understand it. I’ll have to go the graphic art department and ask for translation.

The other article, “The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age” I could read with understanding. This article is more or less, what I wanted and it discussed problems with how newsprint was made and how it disintegrates, microfilming newspapers, nature of selection of materials to copy and preserve and how preservation has other priorites such as bibliographic control, access and other problems faced by the repositories holding newspapers. It discusses the cost and other practical issues that librarians must deal with.

When I googled using the advance search technique, I found more articles that I actually could use for my paper. I did compare this google search to my research using reference works available at our library and searching data bases such as JSTOR and Proquest. The Google search was faster and I found there was much less quess-work on my part as far as finding words to come up with in looking for newspaper preservation. Since I’m not familiar with my topic I can’t just bring words up I can use to start my search, such as: digital preservation, retro-conversion-newspapers – page segmentation-identification and reconstruction-conservators, etc. After only reading a few articles did I realize that these articles contain meta data in their abstracts to help me with my search effort.

My research paper will be on preservation of newspapers in a digitized format. I will be trying to find out: ” What is the best strategy to use when deciding what newspapers will be preserved in digital format?” Who decides on the selection of the material? What organizational structure is used to scan newspapers? Does a newspaper format present a problem in itself? The first part of the paper I will write on the technical difficulties of creating an accurate digital representation of the papers, storage concerns.

The second part of the paper I would like to write about:” How does one access the written material in these newspapers?” How does one select, capture, catalog and archive in a streamline fashion? How is metadata used in the cataloging process? Who selects the meta data? Is it a librarian or is it a computer?
I will structure my paper by trying to answer many questions concerning the process of copying the printed word into a digital format. And the second half of the paper will be on how to capture and retrieve the material on newspapers.

I have gathered a few articles for my research paper. I would like to write on the digitization of print material. I’m finding out how in the past there were all kinds of experiments on preservation and conservation of various print, video, film and various artifacts to preserve the history of a civilization; and preservation always presented many problems. There are presently many groups in this country concerned with the enormous task and time and millions of dollars to accomplish preservation of our printed material. Groups such as Google, Microsoft, Library of Congress, a few universities around this country, including NYU, in our own neck of the woods, are involved in digitizing billions of print material. My trouble is narrowing down a topic and a thesis question to write about. I hope to accomplish this task today in class!

My initial research started with a trip to our library. I initially found a book/journal that contained a number of articles that started me out on reading about preservation and conservation of print, video, multimedia and old recordings from phonographs to tape recorders, to digitized material.

The initial articles I found discussed the deterioration process of print materials. It discussed how the Library of Congress is experimenting with various types of chemical treatments to extend the life of books that have not become so brittle that something can be done to save our past history. It also mentioned how microfilming became one of many solutions to preserve the printed material. Other articles dealt with how institutions have a moral responsibility to preserve great book collections.

At this point in time, I have not decided on a narrow topic I will write about in my paper. I started out looking for digitized preservation but found my self reading up on past preservation techniques and the problem that librarians to historians have, on preserving all types of multimedia materials, in their attempts to preserve all types of visual material giving a glimps into all areas of everyone’s life.

I’m sick today so I’m staying home and reading articles I will start blogging on. Maybe today I can narrow my topic for a research paper as a write about the articles I’m reading. Colleen

P.S. Actually, I’m glad I have no choice but to stay home. I’ll get alot of reading and research started on the internet today seeping on my tea and honey and my kids are in school.